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Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review

120 points by mcraiha 5y ago

notafraudster 5y ago
This is actually a problem with how the developer and publisher chose to deploy their "Enhanced Edition" of the game. But even given the publisher and developer made this stupid choice, another option for an end user would be to spoof playtime on Metro Exodus using any idle tool and then review the game that way.
- Causality1 5y ago
  As far as I know there's no playtime requirements for leaving a review. Back before Steam offered refunds I left several negative reviews for games whose glitches prevented me from playing for more than a few seconds.
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    The minimum playtime to leave a review has been 5 minutes for at least several years now.
    - Causality1 5y ago
      Playtime detection is not great. I've had games that crash on launch but continue racking up playtime because the background process is still there. Most of my games list significantly shorter playtime than reality.
- NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago
  Agreed, it's not a major issue but nonetheless caused by the publisher. Despite that, Steam allowed them to do that mistake.
Zenst 5y ago
That's one heck of a tracking cookie just to make a comment. Makes you wonder about the internet requirements of CAPATCHA's in the future.
devwastaken 5y ago
Recently an expansion for Elite Dangerous came out, names "Odyssey". It's been a very buggy and unfinished experience, and there's very little actual content added in it for the $60 price tag. Steam has a policy of 2 hours of playtime = no return. By playing the tutorial I already had an hour down. Then another hour trying to fix performance issues (to no avail). I tried to issue a return and nope. So now I have a product that falsely advertised itself and I can't return. Gamers need the FTC to rise up. Steam response: "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."
- Jare 5y ago
  I had to request a refund in the Epic Games Store, and it had already counted hours without me even having played the actual game, just trying and failing to log into the servers. They refunded without a question though, so I felt well cared for by EGS.
- vSanjo 5y ago
  I think you might want to do a bit more research on Steam's return policy. It's incredibly liberal. I've played games for 10 hours and returned them with no problem. I don't think you're _wrong_ but I don't think you're right either. I worded my responses well, I told them what was good and bad, and my very reason why. I've enjoyed their support system for returns and have very little to complain about with it.
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)." Their policy in more detail: "Requests are considered on a case by case basis and are not typically issued for purchases of released products that are more than 14 days old, or if the purchased product has more than 2 hours of playtime. For in-game items the refund period is 48 hours and the item must not have been consumed, modified, or transferred. "
  - Macha 5y ago
encryptluks2 5y ago
Steam game downloads are kind of a nightmare. Their game backup compresses the game into a CD, DVD or custom format size, which can take anywhere from a few minutes for a small game to 1 hour for a large game. They provide no straightforward mechanism for you to tell if a game has been updated, and I can only assume that the file hashes aren't going to be the same if you backup the same game twice even if there are no changes. I like to keep backups of my games, but they make it so freaking hard to keep your backups current. Really, it should be a single click of where you want your backups to go and as games get updated then only change what is necessary, not require another full backup and a 1 hour wait.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Steam on low bandwidth is bad, too. It''ll happily keep trying and failing to download client updates (ignoring the "download window" time settings). Viasat likes to kill connections after ~10mb or so, so the thing will download the same 10mb of an update over, and over, all day long, if its allowed to.
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  My home internet is particularly low bandwidth, so I’ve taken to downloading my games from steam on a laptop somewhere else where I can get a 4G/5G signal and just copying the directory to my gaming computer. When it’s migrated to a new system all that’s required is a redownload of the executable
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Some people merely copy their Steam directory in order to create a backup, but they do have a backup mechanism that works differently... and has some pros to it, vs simply copying your entire Steam folder.
    - ninjinxo 5y ago
      Tried this recently, and it's a complete mess if you run low on disk space. When trying to move a 100GB game to the SSD recently it turned out that: 1) steam will not rediscover the files automatically at startup or by attempt to launch the game, nor is there any specific option 2) the existing file discovery process is instantiated by forcing a new download of the game 3) this process will not begin unless there is enough free space for the game So in the end, I had to copy the files back to the HDD to make space on the SSD, start an install of the game on the ssd, exit steam, copy the files to the SSD again, open steam and resume download, then wait for it to verify each file.
Vrondi 5y ago
Just log into your Steam account via their website, and then leave a review there, through the web page.
vSanjo 5y ago
Is this more a problem with the publisher and not Steam? I don't imagine Steam dictates what is and isn't a 'linked' game. I would think the publisher has the final say on what gets a new store-page. I'm curious what page the author reached to purchase the game itself.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Well yes sort of but also: A) Steam is allowing that metadata to be set like that; B) Steam is requiring the download prior to review Which in combination is what's not working. So to fix: A) Steam can disallow metadata being set in such ways; or B) Steam can consider all the weird and wonderful allowed metadata combinations when checking for (among other things) download before review.
manigandham 5y ago
Steam has a ridiculously terrible UX, and somehow it's still better than all of the others like Epic and Origin. I'm amazed at how many billions are spent on these stores but basic UI design and features still can't get implemented. This is probably the most valid question of "what exactly are all those devs doing?"
- Jaygles 5y ago
  I shed a few tears when they decided to make Steam an electron app. It used to be so responsive and snappy even on old computers. And now almost every UI action has significant latency.
  - paco3346 5y ago
    I've had the opposite experience. Ever since they switched to WebKit it actually works for me. Previous to that it was always so sluggish.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    I ended up going into settings and changing it to low bandwidth and low performance mode to make it feel similar to before.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    Technically Steam isn't using Electron but CEF.
- pengstrom 5y ago
  Valve have been nothing but competent and financially successful. In sure they know exactly what they're doing, and it's not optimizing for customer ergonomics.
  - 542458 5y ago
    I disagree on the “nothing but competent”. They have done things like left critical zero click RCEs open for years without patching them. https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-steam-gaming-platform-rce-vulnerability https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-ste... People who have left valve often report that the organization is extremely dysfunctional. https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-... From where I’m standing, Valve looks like a company cursed by success. They have the advantage of controlling the world’s biggest PC game distribution platform (an advantage that is self-sustaining due to network effects), and as such have a fountain of near infinite money. This allows them to run an extremely inefficient organization without suffering the consequences that most companies would.
beebeepka 5y ago
I read the complainant and still don't get what the problem is. This person is unable to write a review for a version of game that does not have a dedicated (for that specific version) store page. This leads to downloading 57.51gb how? Edit: thanks everyone. I guess I have never reviewed a game I don't have installed. They do show play time next to each review. Seems like a better metric than having the game installed lol
- daveFNbuck 5y ago
  They're going to write a review for the version that does have a store page, and are being required to download that version first.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Because I guess when using the Steam client it requires that you have the game installed that you are trying to leave a review for, or have some play time.. since the version they played doesn't have a store page, they had to download the one that does in order to leave the review.
- Volundr 5y ago
  Steam doesn't let you review games you haven't downloaded, meaning in order to review the game he has to download the version which has a store page.
  - oauea 5y ago
    Which sounds like a fantastic feature to cut down on review spam.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Apparently buying the enhanced version included a licence to the regular version and only the latter is used for greenlighting reviews despite buyers going straight to the enhanced. Seems like the studio was trying something clever in terms of branding an update as a remaster or vice versa and ended up setting some metadata in some unfortunate combination.
jorams 5y ago
This is disingenuous. Apparently Steam has a bug where it asks you to write a review for a game that can't be reviewed. That's a bug, but it's pretty minor. The one you can review is a different game. The store page for Metro Exodus describes the Enhanced Edition as: > a stunning visual upgrade that REQUIRES a Ray-Tracing Capable GPU as part of the minimum spec. Things like that can introduce all kinds of new problems and glitches, so reviews for one version don't necessarily apply to the other.
- remram 5y ago
  Is the "Extended Edition" on Steam at all? I can't find it in their catalog. Is the OP trying to review a non-Steam game on Steam, by reviewing a different game, and is complaining that they are different games?
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    A discussion page exists[0], but the review page is empty when you view it (and clicking to add a post brings me to the TF2 review page!) Enhanced Edition is on Steam, but you get it when buying the original Metro Exodus. You get both, the original game (steamid 412020) and the Enhanced Edition (steamid 1449560) in your steam library. I don't own it, but from reading OP's post and other stories online I'm guessing it's similar to how the Call of Duty games handle Singleplayer and Multiplayer. They are 2 separate "games" in your library that you get from a single purchase, and can install independently. But from what I can tell in steamdb, the CoD games don't seem to use separate steamid's for the split, while Metro Exodus EE does. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449560/discussions/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449560/discussions/
    - plttn 5y ago
      CoD games do use different apps. Steam has apps, packages, and depots. Package: the store page, the actual entitlement purchase App: the entries that show up in the steam library Depot: not really important to this discussion
- NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago
meh99 5y ago
Will somebody please think of all the people with inane perspectives on multimedia they want to post! Come on software engineers; social media problems are all there is.
hakube 5y ago
isn't it a mechanism to combat fake reviews or this is just a bug?
bigcorp-slave 5y ago
Software has bugs, in related news water is wet.
fortyseven 5y ago
With an article as dishonest as this, I don't think I'm interested in the observations their review would make. So let's just call the whole thing off.
NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago
OP got it wrong: you didn't buy Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, you bought Metro Exodus and that game came with the Enhanced Edition. It's the same thing for Call of Duty games that have separate singleplayer/multiplayer elements. They have different APPID which is why it's messy but in no way is that malicious (not that you implied it). I'd consider it as a minor annoyance caused by how the publisher handled it and which could be fixed but it doesn't harm anything.
mrkramer 5y ago
This is not Steam's fault it is developer's, developer requests a game page from Steam.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Well, today I bought an app from the play store. From my laptop. I could never download it on the smartphone. Once I got into the smartphone play store the app was still listed with a price without an install button. Trying to buy it again ends up in an error "you already own this app". Then back to the buying button. I know I should always buy from the phone and not from the desktop, the free app rarely installs automatically. Fortunately I could get a refund instantaneously. Unlike the app I just bought. Bought and owned but prevented from installing.
sitzkrieg 5y ago
did they really think they had to finish the download to leave the review on the base game no one will look at? lol
mikl 5y ago
You can see the point of requiring people to actually have installed (and played) the game before reviewing it. The Metro Enhanced Edition is just an edge case that slipped through the cracks. I’d think Hacker News would be the first to sympathise with bugs caused by weird edge cases.

120 points by mcraiha 5y ago

This is actually a problem with how the developer and publisher chose to deploy their "Enhanced Edition" of the game. But even given the publisher and developer made this stupid choice, another option for an end user would be to spoof playtime on Metro Exodus using any idle tool and then review the game that way.

Causality1 5y ago
As far as I know there's no playtime requirements for leaving a review. Back before Steam offered refunds I left several negative reviews for games whose glitches prevented me from playing for more than a few seconds.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  The minimum playtime to leave a review has been 5 minutes for at least several years now.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    Playtime detection is not great. I've had games that crash on launch but continue racking up playtime because the background process is still there. Most of my games list significantly shorter playtime than reality.
NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago
Agreed, it's not a major issue but nonetheless caused by the publisher. Despite that, Steam allowed them to do that mistake.

Zenst 5y ago

That's one heck of a tracking cookie just to make a comment. Makes you wonder about the internet requirements of CAPATCHA's in the future.

devwastaken 5y ago

Recently an expansion for Elite Dangerous came out, names "Odyssey". It's been a very buggy and unfinished experience, and there's very little actual content added in it for the $60 price tag. Steam has a policy of 2 hours of playtime = no return. By playing the tutorial I already had an hour down. Then another hour trying to fix performance issues (to no avail). I tried to issue a return and nope. So now I have a product that falsely advertised itself and I can't return. Gamers need the FTC to rise up. Steam response: "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."

Jare 5y ago
I had to request a refund in the Epic Games Store, and it had already counted hours without me even having played the actual game, just trying and failing to log into the servers. They refunded without a question though, so I felt well cared for by EGS.
vSanjo 5y ago
I think you might want to do a bit more research on Steam's return policy. It's incredibly liberal. I've played games for 10 hours and returned them with no problem. I don't think you're _wrong_ but I don't think you're right either. I worded my responses well, I told them what was good and bad, and my very reason why. I've enjoyed their support system for returns and have very little to complain about with it.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)." Their policy in more detail: "Requests are considered on a case by case basis and are not typically issued for purchases of released products that are more than 14 days old, or if the purchased product has more than 2 hours of playtime. For in-game items the refund period is 48 hours and the item must not have been consumed, modified, or transferred. "
- Macha 5y ago

encryptluks2 5y ago

Steam game downloads are kind of a nightmare. Their game backup compresses the game into a CD, DVD or custom format size, which can take anywhere from a few minutes for a small game to 1 hour for a large game. They provide no straightforward mechanism for you to tell if a game has been updated, and I can only assume that the file hashes aren't going to be the same if you backup the same game twice even if there are no changes. I like to keep backups of my games, but they make it so freaking hard to keep your backups current. Really, it should be a single click of where you want your backups to go and as games get updated then only change what is necessary, not require another full backup and a 1 hour wait.

h2odragon 5y ago
Steam on low bandwidth is bad, too. It''ll happily keep trying and failing to download client updates (ignoring the "download window" time settings). Viasat likes to kill connections after ~10mb or so, so the thing will download the same 10mb of an update over, and over, all day long, if its allowed to.
Tsiklon 5y ago
My home internet is particularly low bandwidth, so I’ve taken to downloading my games from steam on a laptop somewhere else where I can get a 4G/5G signal and just copying the directory to my gaming computer. When it’s migrated to a new system all that’s required is a redownload of the executable
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Some people merely copy their Steam directory in order to create a backup, but they do have a backup mechanism that works differently... and has some pros to it, vs simply copying your entire Steam folder.
  - ninjinxo 5y ago
    Tried this recently, and it's a complete mess if you run low on disk space. When trying to move a 100GB game to the SSD recently it turned out that: 1) steam will not rediscover the files automatically at startup or by attempt to launch the game, nor is there any specific option 2) the existing file discovery process is instantiated by forcing a new download of the game 3) this process will not begin unless there is enough free space for the game So in the end, I had to copy the files back to the HDD to make space on the SSD, start an install of the game on the ssd, exit steam, copy the files to the SSD again, open steam and resume download, then wait for it to verify each file.

Vrondi 5y ago

Just log into your Steam account via their website, and then leave a review there, through the web page.

vSanjo 5y ago

Is this more a problem with the publisher and not Steam? I don't imagine Steam dictates what is and isn't a 'linked' game. I would think the publisher has the final say on what gets a new store-page. I'm curious what page the author reached to purchase the game itself.

OJFord 5y ago
Well yes sort of but also: A) Steam is allowing that metadata to be set like that; B) Steam is requiring the download prior to review Which in combination is what's not working. So to fix: A) Steam can disallow metadata being set in such ways; or B) Steam can consider all the weird and wonderful allowed metadata combinations when checking for (among other things) download before review.

manigandham 5y ago

Steam has a ridiculously terrible UX, and somehow it's still better than all of the others like Epic and Origin. I'm amazed at how many billions are spent on these stores but basic UI design and features still can't get implemented. This is probably the most valid question of "what exactly are all those devs doing?"

Jaygles 5y ago
I shed a few tears when they decided to make Steam an electron app. It used to be so responsive and snappy even on old computers. And now almost every UI action has significant latency.
- paco3346 5y ago
  I've had the opposite experience. Ever since they switched to WebKit it actually works for me. Previous to that it was always so sluggish.
- hn8788 5y ago
  I ended up going into settings and changing it to low bandwidth and low performance mode to make it feel similar to before.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  Technically Steam isn't using Electron but CEF.
pengstrom 5y ago
Valve have been nothing but competent and financially successful. In sure they know exactly what they're doing, and it's not optimizing for customer ergonomics.
- 542458 5y ago
  I disagree on the “nothing but competent”. They have done things like left critical zero click RCEs open for years without patching them. https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-steam-gaming-platform-rce-vulnerability https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-ste... People who have left valve often report that the organization is extremely dysfunctional. https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-... From where I’m standing, Valve looks like a company cursed by success. They have the advantage of controlling the world’s biggest PC game distribution platform (an advantage that is self-sustaining due to network effects), and as such have a fountain of near infinite money. This allows them to run an extremely inefficient organization without suffering the consequences that most companies would.

beebeepka 5y ago

I read the complainant and still don't get what the problem is. This person is unable to write a review for a version of game that does not have a dedicated (for that specific version) store page. This leads to downloading 57.51gb how? Edit: thanks everyone. I guess I have never reviewed a game I don't have installed. They do show play time next to each review. Seems like a better metric than having the game installed lol

daveFNbuck 5y ago
They're going to write a review for the version that does have a store page, and are being required to download that version first.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Because I guess when using the Steam client it requires that you have the game installed that you are trying to leave a review for, or have some play time.. since the version they played doesn't have a store page, they had to download the one that does in order to leave the review.
Volundr 5y ago
Steam doesn't let you review games you haven't downloaded, meaning in order to review the game he has to download the version which has a store page.
- oauea 5y ago
  Which sounds like a fantastic feature to cut down on review spam.
usrusr 5y ago
Apparently buying the enhanced version included a licence to the regular version and only the latter is used for greenlighting reviews despite buyers going straight to the enhanced. Seems like the studio was trying something clever in terms of branding an update as a remaster or vice versa and ended up setting some metadata in some unfortunate combination.

jorams 5y ago

This is disingenuous. Apparently Steam has a bug where it asks you to write a review for a game that can't be reviewed. That's a bug, but it's pretty minor. The one you can review is a different game. The store page for Metro Exodus describes the Enhanced Edition as: > a stunning visual upgrade that REQUIRES a Ray-Tracing Capable GPU as part of the minimum spec. Things like that can introduce all kinds of new problems and glitches, so reviews for one version don't necessarily apply to the other.

remram 5y ago
Is the "Extended Edition" on Steam at all? I can't find it in their catalog. Is the OP trying to review a non-Steam game on Steam, by reviewing a different game, and is complaining that they are different games?
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  A discussion page exists[0], but the review page is empty when you view it (and clicking to add a post brings me to the TF2 review page!) Enhanced Edition is on Steam, but you get it when buying the original Metro Exodus. You get both, the original game (steamid 412020) and the Enhanced Edition (steamid 1449560) in your steam library. I don't own it, but from reading OP's post and other stories online I'm guessing it's similar to how the Call of Duty games handle Singleplayer and Multiplayer. They are 2 separate "games" in your library that you get from a single purchase, and can install independently. But from what I can tell in steamdb, the CoD games don't seem to use separate steamid's for the split, while Metro Exodus EE does. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449560/discussions/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449560/discussions/
  - plttn 5y ago
    CoD games do use different apps. Steam has apps, packages, and depots. Package: the store page, the actual entitlement purchase App: the entries that show up in the steam library Depot: not really important to this discussion
NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago

meh99 5y ago

Will somebody please think of all the people with inane perspectives on multimedia they want to post! Come on software engineers; social media problems are all there is.

hakube 5y ago

isn't it a mechanism to combat fake reviews or this is just a bug?

bigcorp-slave 5y ago

Software has bugs, in related news water is wet.

fortyseven 5y ago

With an article as dishonest as this, I don't think I'm interested in the observations their review would make. So let's just call the whole thing off.

NH4CO2Wp34 5y ago

OP got it wrong: you didn't buy Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, you bought Metro Exodus and that game came with the Enhanced Edition. It's the same thing for Call of Duty games that have separate singleplayer/multiplayer elements. They have different APPID which is why it's messy but in no way is that malicious (not that you implied it). I'd consider it as a minor annoyance caused by how the publisher handled it and which could be fixed but it doesn't harm anything.

mrkramer 5y ago

This is not Steam's fault it is developer's, developer requests a game page from Steam.

johnchristopher 5y ago

Well, today I bought an app from the play store. From my laptop. I could never download it on the smartphone. Once I got into the smartphone play store the app was still listed with a price without an install button. Trying to buy it again ends up in an error "you already own this app". Then back to the buying button. I know I should always buy from the phone and not from the desktop, the free app rarely installs automatically. Fortunately I could get a refund instantaneously. Unlike the app I just bought. Bought and owned but prevented from installing.

sitzkrieg 5y ago

did they really think they had to finish the download to leave the review on the base game no one will look at? lol

mikl 5y ago

You can see the point of requiring people to actually have installed (and played) the game before reviewing it. The Metro Enhanced Edition is just an edge case that slipped through the cracks. I’d think Hacker News would be the first to sympathise with bugs caused by weird edge cases.